Alex Gawley, director of product management for Gmail and Calendar

Gawley joined Google back in 2006 as a financial analyst, but it didn't take long for him to switch to the product management side. By 2008, he took the lead on Gmail and Calendar.

A big part of his job recently was heading up the development of Google Inbox, the company's attempt to reinvent email. Inbox lets you bundle emails by category, snooze messages for later, and set reminders, among other features.

"Google X is one of the few places where the world's best physicians and other scientists sit together in a cafeteria eating free food and figuring out how a smart contact lens should work," Conrad told The Wall Street Journal last year."I have a strong belief that this will be fruitful."

One of Conrad's major pre-Google achievements is cofounding the National Genetics Institute in 1991. As chief scientist there, he developed a new way to test for HIV and other viruses in blood-plasma donations that was much faster and cheaper than previous testing procedures.

Advertisement

3/

Avni Shah, VP of product management for Google Chrome

Shah on stage at Google's I/O conference
Getty / Stephen Lam

Shah joined Google way back in 2003, beginning her career by working on Toolbar and Search. Today, she heads up Google Chrome, which currently has more than 750 million active desktop users and 400 million mobile users. You may recognize her as one of two women to present at Google's I/O developers' conference last year.

Before joining the Chrome team, she spent two years in Zurich, where she led Google Maps and Local efforts for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

4/

Clay Bavor, VP of product management for Google Apps

Bavor initially joined Google in 2005 on the ads team. Right now, he tackles product management and user experience design for Google's consumer and enterprise apps, including Gmail, Drive, Docs, as well as Google's Apps for business and education.

Hiroshi Lockheimer, VP of engineering, Android and Chrome OS

Courtesy of Google

Hiroshi has led management and engineering efforts for Android since he Google in 2006 — two years before the official launch of Android 1.0 and the first Android-powered device in 2008. He added Chrome OS to his engineering responsibilities in 2014.

He's likely been especially busy these last few weeks: Google just released its first major update to Android 5.0 Lollipop.

Jamie Rosenberg, VP of digital content

AP

Jamie Rosenberg, who joined Google in 2010, has a big, complicated job. As vice president of digital content, he leads a team that handles the product development, engineering, merchandising, and business partnerships for the Google Play Store.

Play is becoming an increasingly important business for Google: It's now available in 100 countries and Google just announced that it's going to start testing search ads for apps.

Jen Fitzpatrick, VP of engineering and product management for Geo and Local

Fitzpatrick was one of Google's earliest employees: She joined the company in its first-ever summer internship program in 1999. There were only four other interns at the time and no one had even heard of "this crazy little startup" called Google.

In between, she has also led software development for products like AdWords, Google News, Product Search, corporate engineering and the Google Search Appliance, and cofounded Google's user experience team.

Today, he has the important job of leading development for one of Google's biggest businesses: search ads. As desktop search continues to get superceded by mobile search, Dischler and his team are focused on new formats for app search ads, new mobile bidding tools, locally targeted ads, and ways to measure how many who people see a search ad actually buy a product in-store.

Nick Fox, VP of product management for Android

Google wants those products to better compete "with powerhouses like Facebook and Snapchat," reports The Information's Amir Efrati, and may even be rolling out a new messaging product soon, that works more like the hugely popular app WhatsApp.

Prior to moving to the Android team in 2013, Fox led product development for Google's search ads business.

Advertisement

11/

Bradley Horowitz, VP of Photos and Streams at Google

Michael Seto for Business Insider

Horowitz recently entered the limelight in a big way when he announced the news that the company's social network, Google+, would be broken up into two separate services, Streams and Photos.

He will be leading the development of both (and if you haven't discovered how great Google's photo service is yet, learn more here).

He initially joined Google in 2008 to run product management for apps like Gmail, Docs, and Reader.

12/

Tamar Yehoshua, VP of product management for search

Google

Since 2011, Yehoshua has led the team trying to make sure that Google search works seamlessly anywhere in the world, on any device. Right now, one of her big focuses is on Google's flagship mobile app, which lets users search via voice, among other things.

The focus on speech isn't surprising for Yehoshua. She first joined Google in 2010 on the Translate team, where she helped launch Conversation Mode, which enables you to translate speech back and forth between languages on Android.

Previously, she was a VP of advertising technology at Amazon.

Advertisement

13/

Now that you've met the rising stars, meet some of Google's earliest employees...